“When a mountains foot I reached,
I saw him there,
In the light of that Star that hope does keep.”
-Canto 1, JH
…
The sound of the Armiger’s voice carried down into the fallen night, “Bring ‘er back, Trent, er it’s yer ass.”
For answer she heard the grunt of the little brute as he rounded the fenced yard of the coop and a great beating of harried hen wings announced that he was scattering one column of her wretched winged retinue up and above to her right, to westward.
Lynn’s clogged feet slid downward to the creek and she knew the wisdom of Kyle Plowbent, a master after all. For without moccasins she had the choice of clogging along marking her every step among the rocks, or of taking off the wooden shoes and having the very rocks of the aptly named Rockies wreck her feet.
She had good feet, and there ruin would be hers.
She had cut left along the creek while the beastly Trent was scattering chickens, crashing through brush and rarely missing a reason to cuss. The burly little fury above and behind her called out assuring his master, “I gots ‘er Boss!” and then with a grunt of anger and the terrible squawk of a broken backed chicken, the slave catcher slid with a wrack of sliding stone down into the creek.
Lynn had to let Gimp Girl go among the general hen panic and found the eastward cow track with her clogs. Stooping, as Trent cursed down in the creek perhaps a stone throw behind her and also off her right shoulder, she decided her course, commanding herself with her mind like some inner rider upon a gimp horse:
‘Out of the shoes… off with the apron and petticoat… Wrap the shoes and coat in a bundle...not perfect but good enough. Loop the apron neck, wrap, fold in the ends, tie off the pack.’
Her eyes were now adjusted somewhat to the night.
Farmstead Plowbent was all lit, yelling and bustling behind her.
Trent was clacking and splashing his way out of the rocky creek—the coop roaring into a proper inferno. There was no baying of hounds behind her as she tied off the pack, which, according to her knowledge, indicated that the plague doctor used greyhounds, sight hounds that where not barkers but runners.
‘If you are in the clear at first light, you will be run down.’
The Armiger was on the hill before the bonfire of Henary, in a terrible tall commitment, not a rage. She could see, through the willows, that a man of half breed aspect came to him and that he was being directed to search the ground for tracks.
‘They are going to mark me for a morning course of the hounds, keep this floundering brute harrying me through the night—I would plot the like, if my prize hen had flown the coop.’
Her dress was indigo, to not show the stains of her daily work. Her hair was the color of night, Darla had oft told. The indigo petticoat was wrapped in her black apron, the yellow shoes all snug within. Her feet were good on the cow trail course, a well and beaten track that she knew in the dark even, having followed it back from Ledgefork just before dusk after apprehending a calf.
‘You are the hen-catcher and this is your course, Lynn.’
With her bundle tucked under her left arm, she had a flash of caper in her eyes when she lifted a cracked stone from the edge that marked the border of trail and bank and hurled it underhanded across the creek bed to clatter on the far bank, back west, downstream just a titch.
The splash and clatter of Trent finally clearing the creek on this side behind her was crowned with that clatter of rock. That rock must have been blessed by Mother Mary herself, for it slid and clattered down the rocky south bank as if a loosened slide of stone from some poor plague doctor betrothed girl, in terror of lurking as a fiend’s dour crone, had crossed the creek straight away and made for the cottonwoods there above the far bank.
A flaming arrow arced over the place where her stone had fallen and clattered to thud into a great cotton wood trunk. There it licked like a guiding serpent in a just fallen garden and the Armiger’s voice boomed, “From the spot, Trent—you’ll no eat ‘till ye bring ‘er back.”
“Yez Boss!” sounded the eager yell. And the little wire spring of a man, who she must after-all admire for his rugged frame if not for his lack of shame, splashed and clattered across the creek towards that licking arrow. This noise, and the further clanging of two other burly slaves down the bank as the half-Indian peered with hands covering his eyes against the flames after his master’s human hounds, looking she thought for a sign of motion marking her among the cottonwoods to the south, made the perfect racket to cover her low, swift, gliding run along the cow trail, eastward, and upward, up Shingle Creek.
Moments later, in the lurid lit distance, as she ran along the powdery way, all eaten of grass, her feet now caked in cow shit, she could hear behind her the sounds of men beating the bank, as if she were some normal girl, whose father had not taken her up the mountain. For Hunter Jamison had no son, and surely treated his little daughter like one. Only a fool would have made for the immediate cover of the cottonwoods and the runnagate trap of pasture beyond.
But a bad girl who had been a good little boy once upon a toddling time, despite her overgrowth of hideous ass making her running stride less then the perfect glide, knew that when men hunted creatures, that those critters climbed. Father had told her that Elk and Bison upon a time were all about the valley floor. But with the coming of man and his guns and horses to make way for their sheep and cattle, these four-legs of the grasses had become great big goats seeking the high passess.
‘This, the half Indian surely knows. In five more minutes he will mark your trail for the runners. By morning he will know, in the exact, where to send the houndsmen.’
A terrible resolve stole over her and she watched, as if from afar, as if she were a fine lady looking down from a guilt tower above the mist-cloaked lake, singing a mourning hymn for dead Maid Jamison. In her mind’s misty eye she looked down and there saw an image of her upon the high rock, above the slide, upon one of the upper ledges from whence the valley below looked like a painting. Upon that high edge stood her, Lynn, harried and had; apish men with cropped ears scrambling upward, panting hounds bounding around the rock shelf, a savage breed climbing the mountain on the back of a sure-footed mountain pony. There Lynn saw, in her mind’s eye, as she ran, her tomorrow yawning—and, spreading her arms, she dove out over the rocky abyss.
She was beautiful!
A thrill smote her.
‘Yes, thank you, Mother Mary—I will! A high place from where I might leap in grace, a virgin like you, I will die!’
‘I will not know the wench’s place, but will fall like an angel from the sky!’ she sang inside, the unseen organ in her cathedral shivering her bones to a quiver.
Even the glow was lost behind her as she ran, granting time to self castigate over what was behind, and not, as would be her normal concerns in retrieving stock, wondering what crept ahead. Wolves, lions and grizzly where somewhere up ahead, Lynn having oft wondered which sort had silently done for her father on his last lone hunt.
Onward she fled, trusting her ten years along this path to keep her true. Jupiter began to wink on ahead, like her guiding star, cresting the mountains eastward and upward.
‘Upward!’
Her eyes were now adjusted, enabling her to make out the bulk of the mountains. For once she feared no bear, no cat, no wolf—no, not even a man. Even if it were merely the side hill above Ledgefork, a mere league off where she must cross after those sots made off beating the bushes for her on the south side and got on her heels, she would find a place to die, a place to defiantly fly.
An angel of dark feminine aspect reared in her mind’s eye, a woman who possessed much of the aspect of Granny Darla, if young and not yet done, ‘A header from twenty feet will do for you—kiss the Mountain’s feet and Godspeed!’
She was now running in a full stride, no longer concerned with stealth to glide—and, with a smack horror struck, and another smack, and another. Buttoned petticoat and tight tied apron strings did have their practical recommendation for a running girl, as she now discovered.
‘No!’ she cried inside as her over-budded breasts flapped and smacked, betraying her passage as if the looming trees were leering men at arms in the Lords besotted hall, gawking at her shameful progress, her flapping boobs announcing to all, ‘This two-legged cow has run from her stall.’
“Sweet Mountain of Death,” she moaned as she followed the trail close to the rushing water, caring little what owned those two lambent eyes reflecting Jupiter’s starry light on the far bank, “bless me a rock ledge from to fly.”
Feeling now abashed with her running flap, she bundled the offending organ pipes under her right arm as her clothes were under her left and continued her run—a right hard run that few big lumbering men might have made—up Shingle Mill Hollow, in the gloom of first night.
Lynn did not look back. But the angel of her mind’s eye saw them there. The lady in the tower above her mind gasped as Lynn sped past, to see a league behind her a lurid snake of torches bobbing along the north bank: a hawk-eyed half-breed stalking like a panther, reading the ground, sure that his quarry would be found, a brutish man without hair or ears holding Lynn’s unlaundered nightgown to his slit nostrils, snorting up her scent, followed by three more of slavish sort, to include a man in a hood.
But that angel, that lady perhaps, sitting in observing concern far above, did not turn away, and did not either pray—rather, that uncommon form of a woman, sang, sang a sweet song, a song that Lynn sensed in her soaring soul, was meant to bless the night and hold back the day.
…
Notes
-1. Titling note. Though the Utesh Mountains, and the Rockies in general, do not have heather of the sort found in the Uplands of the British Isles, the runaways of Gaelic stock, in early Christian times, so named heathens for their association with the high wastes and there windswept heather, do name the mountain meadows of Wester New England after that Old World convention. It is a common ambition, even among freemen and freedmen, no less bond souls, to find an unseen alpine meadow above the aspen and shielded by sentinel fir, and there live far away from Church and State.
